CGMan

Clarifying Nadia's Rendering Progress

Nadia's rendering is just Nadia..  Not the background.  I originally intended to use an AI tool on the background so I can get away with only rendering 25% of the frames and use interpolation for the rest.. I still may do that.  But because this is taking so long I have a new plan:

My intention is to render a spherical envir...

Miku Stuff

Hello,

Here is Miku now able to smile and frown.  I think this pretty much completes her face rigging.  I am waiting for her voice actor to record & deliver the script for her animation; should be any day now.

Nadia's animation is 78.35% completed on the rendering of the foreground pass by the way.

More to come! 2023-09-24 23:41:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Calling a Lid

Eyelids / Lashes rigged.  Partially rendered preview.  I still need to make her able to smile & frown.

Hand Job

Have I used that joke before?  Probably.

Anyway..  I had to re-rig the hands because I wanted to move the default position of the arms up to allow for larger muscles.  Also I adjusted her finger lengths to make them more obviously a female digit ratio.

Browsing The Internet

Miku over-acting with her newly rigged eyebrows

Face Rig Evolved

CGM - Post #076 (Sept 2023)

This is an advance post for a future release.  Send me a private message if you have any questions.  Thank you so very much for your support!  It makes these fun animations possible!  Thank you!!

Updates!

Both elements from yesterday's post are improved.  The Storm gods came through and told me a bug in the read node requires a "Calculate Velocity" node after it and that fixed the sliding flesh problem.

And Miku's face rig now has sealable and retractable lips.  It's all a single global control, I don't have it broken up into sect...

Miku Talking and More

Hey...

I'm rigging up Miku's face.  Right now she only has meticulously weighted bones so she can only move her jaw.  But that will soon change.

Also, is a clip of the skinny version of Muki simmed in Storm.  It has some unexpected issues...  I'm communicating with some Storm brains and hopefully they can sort out...

Full Body SoftBody Test Animation

Hey everyone.  Sorry this took so long, I had to tear this up and redo things several times before I found a winning approach.  Some notes:

I originally tried to have all bones be collision models with small holes in the flesh that snugly fit around the bones, and then I would add little "attach points" where the flesh would adhe...

FK/IK Switching

Believe it or not, I've never used FK/IK switching before.  It took a few tries to get it all working right.  My past animations were typically full-time IK, and I animated the goal objects to emulate motion arcs.  True FK does a much better job of giving arcs..  So I'm quite pleased with this new system.  I'll do it thi...

More Rigging Stuff

In with the good air, out with the bad air.

Miku Partially Boned

Just the torso so far.  I have set up little grabbers on her tummy so she can distend or suck in her gut... but I didn't animate them yet.

Miku Bonless

In case you were curious, this is what Miku looks like boneless

Fusion Fail

Unfortunately my first attempt to fuse particle groups together was a failure.  I've made inquiries.  To be continued.

EDIT: Well after hearing back from some people who would know... it seems that this fusion thing only works in the old system, not the new nodal system....  So I could bring the par...

One More Boobs Test

I learned a new thing so I wanted to test this out while I was in this scene.  For Storm, we cannot yet have two different kinds of materials interacting with each other...  Example: You cannot have a set of boobs being pressed together by a bra or a shirt..  They sim as if they are hanging free.  This was a problem with my p...

Bosomy Storm Test Sim

This is carried over from my Storm test two posts ago.

The difference here is I used a network of strings to attach the mass to the chest wall, instead of just two of them.  The goal was to get a more bouncy quality; which I feel I achieved.

Also for the first time I created the Storm particles in a new way.  Instead of mod...

Miku Rigging Stuff and Voice Test

Hey everyone.  Here is a clip of Miku bending around.

In the past, I put all of the spine rotation between the ribcage and the pelvis.  It turns out I was wrong.. The spine at the ribcage does bend a little bit.  The front of the ribcage is all flexible cartilage aside from the sternum.  So this is my first flexible rib...

New sim Test

This is nothing earth-shattering.. But it's kind of neat.  Ignore the fact that they look like a pair of testicles.. That wasn't the intention.

With Storm, the particles used to sim have to all be a uniform type of physics.. You can't vary the amount of stiffness, etc..  But using this technique I'm calling magnets (It's actually...

Storm Test Part 1

This will become more clear in test part 2.  But this works.  A volume-style model using a cloth simulation solver and getting true self-collisions.  As I said, it will get more clear in test part 2 coming soon.

EDIT: Whoops.. Forgot to attach the clip!

EDIT 2: Part 2 failed...  Deform node not cooperating... &nbs...

CGM - Post #075 (July 2023)

This is an advance post for a future release.  Send me a private message if you have any questions.  Thank you so very much for your support!  It makes these fun animations possible!  Thank you!!

Cagey

Here's a little update from my last post.  I finished with making the skinny model and now I'm nearly done making her skinny cage model.. just the bit on her legs remains.

This is the first time I'm taking this approach.. I will be combining her skinny and beefy cage models into a single object and rigging their weights and joint stuf...

Miku Growth Preview And Other News

Hey everyone.  Attached is a preview of new girl Miku growing.  Her lower body is not done yet.  Ignore her mega-firm boobs as those will eventually be simulated and pulled down with gravity.

Nadia's animation rendering is currently 47% complete.  Ouch.

So much time (not to mention money) was wasted with the flirt...

Octane Update

So...  Our theory was that my machine did not have enough memory...  16 GB.  He just overnighted me 32 GB of memory... At great expense I am sure.

Unfortunately the same symptoms are happening. :/  It rendered one frame, then errored out on the next one.

Octane Is So Frustrating

Hi...  So I was rendering with Octane and everything was going mostly okay.  But when I hit frame 739 or so, it started crashing.  And it crashed consistently after a specific number of samples had been rendered.

So I tried lowering the total samples to just below this number, and it managed to successfully render the frame....

Good News with Octane

I have just finished converting all of Nadia's rigging over to the Octane format.  It was very complicated and a lot of learning involved along the way.  There are a couple of displacement maps I skipped using in order to conserve GPU memory and simplify the process.  I am going to try implementing them if I can.  After that ...

Positive Octane Test

Okay...  I've got something working with Octane finally.  What you see in the attached clip was rendered with Octane.  It is blending between two different displacement maps, independently on each side of the test capsule, masked with a weightmap.

Ignore the unsightly little holes that appear in the object, that is because t...

Octane Issue

So this is the problem...

Octane does not support every feature that is available in Lightwave.  It does not support traditional methods of texture mapping with UV Maps.  And it APPEARS it does not support weight maps.  It does support three UV Maps per model.  Pretty limiting.  Nadia has 18 UV Maps.  Her vari...

Octane Update

I've got the software installed and working.  It does crash once in a while which is annoying.  The materials are a completely different system..  So everything will have to be reconstructed; and that is a lot.  It's going to take me some time to figure all of this out.

One thing's for sure..  It is very, very<...